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Strawberry Preserves

A sweet preserve made by cooking strawberries with sugar and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Strawberry Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Make the preserves

  1. Pour sugar over strawberries in a pot.

  2. Place on low heat and stir until sugar dissolves.

  3. Once boiling, increase heat and boil rapidly for 8 minutes.

  4. Add lemon juice and boil for an additional 2 minutes.

Rest and jar

  1. Remove from heat and let stand in the pot overnight in a cool place.

  2. In the morning, pour into jars and seal immediately.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Strawberries
Provide the fruit, flavor and bulk that the preserves are made from.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it by binding water and inhibiting spoilage.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavor and helps the pectin in the fruit set.

The step that matters

Boil rapidly for 8 minutes. Strawberries need a hard, sustained boil to evaporate water and concentrate the sugar. A weak boil leaves the preserves runny and more prone to spoiling.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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